


may death find you alive

by redledgers



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Deal with a Devil, Debts and repayment, Demon Deals, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 11:12:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10875570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redledgers/pseuds/redledgers
Summary: He makes a deal and forfeits his soul.





	may death find you alive

As he stumbles toward the crossroads, one hand pressed against the gash on his shoulder, he laughs to himself. It’s a cruel laugh, sharp and mocking. Fancy him, getting lost in his own city, getting lost in the winding streets and dark alleys while he’s trying to escape. Escape is such a pitiful word for what he’s doing. Abandoning his blood, his roots, diving forth into the darkness with no other options and no knowledge yet of the consequences. He’s too young to know them anyway; he never did pay attention to anything outside of his books and workshop. Yes, abandonment is a better word.

The acrid taste of smoke follows him, but he doesn’t know if it’s because the city is burning or if it’s the remnants of a minor accident. He isn’t fazed by the curl of black tendrils around his ankles, the billowing presence behind him, the sharp coldness of something lacking (his sister’s life, forfeit too young, now lost in the damp mud beside the river). Things never change, he laughs, and they never will. Now at the center, he looks toward the forest, the gates, the ways out of the city he never considered before. From every angle loom monsters: the grasping branches of a dense forest he never saw the depths of; the serpentine tracks of wagon wheels forming grids as they intersect and glide over each other; the pounding in his chest from an unfamiliar force telling him _go now and don’t look back_ with every stuttering beat.

Percy doesn’t remember how he made it out (the fragments are buried under guilt and stone, six feet under and scrawled out in blood) but he remembers the scar. It becomes a symbol of everything he hates. There are more scars that he doesn’t care to look at, ones he keeps hidden by collars and sleeves.

Percy doesn’t remember how he stays alive (there’s wandering and haggling and losing everything he owns) but he remembers the night he makes the decision to keep living. It becomes a beacon of twisted hope, light stained with darkness, and this one he wears proudly.

Shadows become darker around him, coalescing into something comforting. He can hide here, away from prying eyes, away from his shame, but he realizes quickly there are certain entities he cannot hope to avoid. She’s intimidating at first glance (and at many glances afterward, while many are from awe, there also lingers a thread of fear), scorched brown horns twisting back from her forehead, the smoky form of wings spreading from her shoulders, and a grin that reveals pointed teeth. He hunts her down, follows whispers and stories and misdirection into the darkest underground planes. There are no illusions to what he’s doing, no masks this time. He’s come to make a deal.

Haggling, he finds, is her strong suit, her lifeblood and source of entertainment. She takes no prisoners except when it interests her, and for all the money he could promise her, she sees something better for the taking, something she has been looking forward to for ages. The smoke this time is familiar, tangible. Not for the first time, but also not for the last time, it curls around him, floods his vision and his nostrils. He feels as if his circulation has been cut off before the dams are opened and he can breathe again.

She collects early on, in bits and pieces. He feels his soul tearing, shredded with burning claws piece by piece. It is a slow process, like crashing waves feasting on solid rock for centuries. There is something tugging back, fighting every millimeter ripped, and he cannot fathom why—he was fully hers in return for the favors she soon would grant. But there is a gradual dawning, a slow realization that something else has a hold on him, something darker than she, something he had bargained with many years before. She will destroy this too. She will cast him away for deception, but there is not much she could take that he would not feel relieved to be free from. His life holds no meaning without revenge, without _them_. And they are gone, lost in the wind and forgotten to time.

When the year reaches it’s zenith, at the edge of a mountain range, he finds out the news: there is more she can do if he offers something else; there is someone she can save. A monster, a demon, a devil, all these things describe her, the bargaining and trading of souls for money, information, revenge. These things she knows well, these things she hoards in the depths of the underworld. And still she will devour him, but she will deliver his sister alive, at the top of the highest peak when the moon has disappeared. This peak is a crossroad of the winds; he knows this from his books, from the mythology that is woven through the land he was born in.

But the wind does not buffet that night when she unleashes hell, tears him asunder a final time, but he sees her, _Cassandra_ , a small price to pay for the smoke and hollow eyes that engulfs him now (the soft cry he hears echoes in his memories: the last sound she uttered). He stumbles now as he did then, past a river and toward the road, splattered in blood—an old wound reopened (the deal, the first deal, the one made to numb the pain). It leaves a path, splattered across mud and stone, as he runs from the crossroad, lost in the wilderness he had grown to know so well. Lost and scared like the deer she hunted, the hart she startled before chasing for sport (and later for food; even a devil does not waste). Now it is her laugh that follows him, cruel and mocking perhaps, but the pounding in his head dulls and he hears the difference. The anguish he mistook for mockery. The tangled root his foot catches in and the too hot touch of her hand on his shoulder. And his sister standing tall before him, no longer a mirage.

Her scorched brown horns twist back from her forehead still but the wings are gone, hidden. It’s too much for haggling but here she is intimidating enough to charm even the stingiest merchant out of his best wares.

Here, her golden eyes are something else: full of mirth and something _deeper._

Here, he has gained and lost and gained again but not without a series of jagged deals and tangled thorns leaving their mark.

Here, he sees the raven watching with the same smoky black wings. But it is standing guard.


End file.
